Immoral Equivalence

The NY Times vs Israel

Israel = Hamas. Hamas = Israel.

That’s pretty much all you need to know how The New York Times and one of its columnists view Israel.

If you haven’t already read or listened to Nicholas Kristof’s front page opinion piece from this past week, detailing allegations of sexual assault of Palestinian prisoners at the hands of Israeli jailers, soldiers and settlers, you can do so by clicking this link.

You should, because it has rocked the pro-Israel camp.

The Israeli foreign ministry called it, “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”

“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristof turns the victim into the accused.”

Some of the allegations in the Kristof article are absurd; that Israeli prison guards trained their dogs to rape the prisoners.

But some of the allegations made by the alleged victims Kristof says he spoke with, may be true.

Assaults of prisoners by their keepers, although never justified and never to be ignored, occur in prisons and jails all over the world.

In Israel, five IDF reserve soldiers were accused of severely abusing a Palestinian security detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility in 2024.

The five soldiers severely beat and assaulted the prisoner after he was brought to the detention facility, leaving him with grave injuries, including broken ribs and an internal tear in his rectum.

In 2004, American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison sexually abused detainees, beat them and tortured them.

Remember the Abner Louima case in New York during Rudy Giuliani’s time as mayor? Louima was a Haitian American man who was arrested, brutalized and sexually assaulted by New York City police officers. His injuries were so severe he required three major surgeries.

Kristof said there is “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes” but that didn’t stop him from conflating the outliers and outlaws in Israeli society with the systemic, widespread and depraved assaults by hundreds of terrorists against Israeli civilians on October 7th. For Kristof, it’s not just about the sexual assault, it’s not just about the lawlessness of some so-called settlers. The most insidious part of the article, what lies at the heart of his piece, is the moral equivalency he draws between Israel and Hamas.

“The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7,” Kristof writes, “now happens to Palestinians day after day.”

“The Israeli government rejects suggestions that it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women.”

“Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights. Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well.”

Israel = Hamas. Hamas = Israel.

Supporters of Israel should have seen this coming. The Times hasn’t hesitated to print false allegations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, that it purposely targeted children, that it starved the population. But all those blood libels were wearing thin. They had been debunked. They were fading away.

The forces aligned against Israel needed something new, something fresh to demonize and delegitimatize the Jewish state.

With impeccable timing, knowing the exhaustive, evidence-based report of the grotesque Hamas atrocities of October 7th was about to be released, the pro-Hamas NGO’s found their enabler, their ally, in Nicholas Kristof.

What better place to deflect attention away from the organized, unspeakable, and depraved crimes committed by Hamas against Israeli women, men and children on October 7th, than the New York Times?

What better place, already so prone to the progressive ideology of moral equivalency, already proven to be amenable to anti-Israel disinformation, than the New York Times?

So, what will be the fallout from the explosion Kristof’s article caused? It will give American politicians even more excuses to vote against military aid to Israel. It will give campus antisemites more reason to exclude Jewish students from university organizations. The podcasters will voraciously spread it on social media. The Jew-hating street demonstrators will have something new to add to their stupid chant repertoire.

But here’s the biggest fallout from the Kristof article; the commandos of the pro-terror, anti-Israel armies, deftly shot a multi-warhead ballistic missile right at Israel’s heart, its moral high ground.

While Israel can survive missiles and drones, it can’t survive defeat on the battlefield of public opinion. And that’s why this equation formulated by The New York Times and Nicholas Kristof is so destructive.

Israel = Hamas. Hamas = Israel.

Israel has indeed won stunning triumphs against its enemies in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. But as this past week proved, there much more to Israel’s war against its enemies than military victories. It’s a war being waged far from the Middle East, far from the battlefield, right here, right now, and it’s far from over.